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Identifying gameplay videos that exhibit bugs in computer games

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Abstract

With the rapid growing market and competition in the gaming industry, it is challenging to develop a successful game, making the quality of games very important. To improve the quality of games, developers commonly use gamer-submitted bug reports to locate bugs in games. Recently, gameplay videos have become popular in the gaming community. A few of these videos showcase a bug, offering developers a new opportunity to collect context-rich bug information. In this paper, we investigate whether videos that showcase a bug can automatically be identified from the metadata of gameplay videos that are readily available online. Such bug videos could then be used as a supplemental source of bug information for game developers. We studied the number of gameplay videos on the Steam platform, one of the most popular digital game distribution platforms, and the difficulty of identifying bug videos from these gameplay videos. We show that naïve approaches such as using keywords to search for bug videos are time-consuming and imprecise. We propose an approach which uses a random forest classifier to rank gameplay videos based on their likelihood of being a bug video. Our proposed approach achieves a precision that is 43% higher than that of the naïve keyword searching approach on a manually labelled dataset of 96 videos. In addition, by evaluating 1,400 videos that are identified by our approach as bug videos, we calculated that our approach has both a mean average precision at 10 and a mean average precision at 100 of 0.91. Our study demonstrates that it is feasible to automatically identify gameplay videos that showcase a bug.

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Notes

  1. https://gaming.youtube.com/

  2. Games with the highest budgets for development and promotion.

  3. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W9in3AEYuJk

  4. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pnFuzq8Ii8o

  5. http://steamcommunity.com/id/GamesGlitches/

  6. https://www.twitch.tv/

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Software Analysis and Intelligence Lab (SAIL), Queen’s University, Kingston, ON, Canada

    Dayi Lin & Ahmed E. Hassan

  2. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, Canada

    Cor-Paul Bezemer

Authors
  1. Dayi Lin
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  2. Cor-Paul Bezemer
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  3. Ahmed E. Hassan
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Correspondence to Dayi Lin.

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Communicated by: Emerson Murphy-Hill

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Lin, D., Bezemer, CP. & Hassan, A.E. Identifying gameplay videos that exhibit bugs in computer games. Empir Software Eng 24, 4006–4033 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10664-019-09733-6

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